At Salon, Joe Conason writes:
If anyone still believes we must drill, baby, drill offshore -- aside from Bill Kristol, that is, who wants to sink wells even closer to precious coastal wetlands -- then perhaps it is time to consider again the potential benefits of nationalization. After all, there is one country that has established an unrivaled record for environmental safety while exploiting its offshore petroleum reserves. That would be Norway, which created the company now known as Statoil Hydro as a fully state-owned entity and still controls nearly two-thirds of the company's "privatized" shares.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Statoil rigs in the North Sea are required by law to maintain special "acoustic switches" that shut down operations completely (and remotely) in case of a blowout or explosion. The US Mines and Minerals Service, under the industry-friendly Bush administration, decided that rigs operating in American waters need not install those switches because they are "very costly." At $500,000 per switch, they now look like an enormous bargain, of course.
What makes Norway so different from the United States -- and much more likely to install the most protective energy technology -- is that the Norwegian state can impose public values on oil producers without fighting off lobbyists and crooked politicians, because it owns and controls the resources.
Conason goes on to say that Dick Armey, as chair of the right-wing FreedomWorks, has praised the environmental record in off-shore drilling of Norway's Statoil Hydro. Without mentioning the socialist nature of that state-owned enterprise.
That's the same kind of avoidance we often hear from the more avid supporters of expanding nuclear power in the United States who delight in saying that France provides nearly 80% of its electricity from nukes. Never mentioned is the fact that Électricité de France is 85% owned by the government.
Government ownership does not, of course, guarantee environmental soundness. One need only look at the disastrous legacy of Russia's oil industry - to say nothing of its nuclear industry - to see how badly things can go awry. But in a democracy there ought to be more choices than merely whether to drill or not drill, whether to split atoms or not. Whether the public sector or private sector performs these functions (if these functions are performed) ought not to be a question permanently off the table.
Our country's long-term record of privatizing profits and socializing losses - something we have witnessed in the financial crisis and see the potential for in $54 billion worth of nuclear loan guarantees and in the Price-Anderson Act - is a matter that should stop being swept under the all-purpose "free market" carpet. Nationalization is not the only answer. It may only rarely be appropriate. But it's not an approach that should be dismissed out of hand, whether we're talking about Big Finance or Big Energy.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003:
A special federal court has struck down the cornerstone of the recently passed campaign finance reform law.
A special three-judge federal court panel on Friday struck down much of the law's cornerstone: a broad ban on the use of corporate and union "soft money" contributions by political parties.
In two 2-1 votes, the panel ruled that political parties can raise corporate and union contributions for general party-building activities like get-out-the-vote drives and voter registration, but cannot use them for issue advertising or candidate-specific activities.
In another major finding, the court also ruled as an unconstitutional violation of free speech sweeping new restrictions on election-time political ads by special-interest groups and others. But it said other ad limits the law's sponsors included in the legislation as a backup were constitutional.